Peyton Reed Explains The 'Ant-Man And The Wasp' Post-Credits Scene

You might not be aware of this, but Marvel tends to add these things called "post-credits scenes" to their movies. They're scenes that arrive after, or sometimes during the end credits. Crazy, I know! Ant-Man and the Wasp is the latest MCU film with post-credits scenes waiting to be dissected, and director Peyton Reed took some time to explain their connection to Avengers: Infinity War. Spoilers follow.

Ant-Man and the Wasp is about as "stand-alone" as an MCU film gets. The bulk of the film is set before the events of Infinity War, and as a result, nothing going on in the movie proper ties into that mega-Marvel sequel. But the post-credits scenes are a different story. During said scenes, Scott Lang, aka Ant-Man (Paul Rudd), finds himself venturing into the Quantum Realm. Scott ends up getting stuck there, because the mighty snap of Thanos ends up erasing Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), Janet van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer), and Hope van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly) from existence. How awkward.

In a recent interview with Uproxx, Ant-Man and the Wasp director Peyton Reed broke down the post-credit moments, and explained how it was slightly difficult to make a bunch of characters disappear after he just spent an entire movie bringing them back together:

"The thing that really appealed to us...was because it was a thing the whole way through of how are we going to deal with this issue Infinity War, and it occurred to us we were going to do it in an Ant-Man and the Wasp way. Which was to tell our story, make it self-contained, and make the ending of the movie with everything wrapped up in such a neat bow at the end of the movie. The mission at hand, Scott Lang being on house arrest and seeing his daughter, the X-Con guys landing the big fish and getting their company saved, Hank and Janet reunited – it's all The Partridge Family, the neatest possible bow of all time. And then we go into a colorful credit sequence. And then do this scene that would hopefully punch the audience in the gut."

Personally speaking, I would've been fine if there had been no reference to Infinity War anywhere within Ant-Man and the Wasp, but I suppose fans wouldn't have been thrilled about that. Reed realizes that too, adding:

"I think everybody in the back of their minds' are like, 'okay, they can't ignore it, they can't ignore it.' What's going to happen and who is it going to happen to? So we wanted to just have fun with that. And for me, you're not going to do the event in a bigger way than Infinity War did it. It had to be its own different tone and it had to be specific to our movie."

I'm sure Avengers 4 will find a way to remedy all of this – I doubt Scott is going to spend that entire film stuck in the Quantum Realm. For now, we'll just have to make due with the mostly light-hearted fun of Ant-Man and the Wasp, which is still in theaters now.